August 1, 2016 On Travel Summer on the Stones By Ben Crair Chekhov, Thomas Mann, and the longueurs of vacationing. After a proposal from a rich but ridiculous suitor, Tony Buddenbrook, the high-society heroine of Thomas Mann’s first novel, leaves the German city of Lübeck for Travemünde, a resort town where the Trave River meets the Baltic Sea. “I won’t pay any attention to the social whirl at the spa,” she tells her brother Tom. “I know all that quite well enough already.” Tony stays instead in the modest home of her father’s friend the harbor pilot, whose son, a medical student named Morten Schwarzkopf, is also on vacation. On her first day, he accompanies Tony to the spa, and she invites him to meet the friends she had pledged to avoid. “I don’t think I’d fit in very well,” Morten says. “I’ll just go sit back there on those stones.” By the end of the summer, Tony and Morten have fallen in love, and “on the stones” is a “fixed phrase” in their relationship, Mann writes, meaning “to be lonely and bored.” I visited Travemünde recently and after a few hours felt rather on the stones myself. The Baltic Sea was impotent at raising waves, and an incontinent gray sky drizzled on the city. The riverside homes along the Front Row, where the harbor pilot lived, are now tourist shops and restaurants filled with old German couples not talking to each other. The other nineteenth-century landmarks of Tony and Morten’s romance haven’t aged much better. The Sea Temple, a waterfront gazebo where they sit so close their hands nearly touch, fell into the Baltic in 1872, drowning with it the records of young lovers who scratched their initials on the walls. Read More
August 1, 2016 Our Correspondents Unconventional, Part 8: The Court Objects to Allen Ginsberg By Nathan Gelgud Throughout the summer, Nathan Gelgud, a correspondent for the Daily, has been posting a weekly comic about the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the contested 1968 Democratic National Convention. Catch up with the whole series here. Read More
August 1, 2016 On the Shelf By the Seat of Your Pants, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From an eighties ad for Hillbillies Jeans. Today in age-old arguments about the creative life: “In some annexes of the writing community it’s been playfully termed the ‘pantsing vs. plotting/outlining/planning’ debate. Pantsers fly by the seats of their pants: they write and see where it takes them. Planners, well, plan before they write … There is evidence that when readers read stories, they identify with the characters and do much the same thing. It may be the case that pantsers engage in this kind of imaginative and empathic recreation when they tell stories, which is precisely why they cannot plan. They have to tell the story in order to know its contours and structure. They have to place themselves in the minds of the characters and then simulate what the characters do … These writers work by faith that their emotions channel into words a latent object which will later prove to possess a structure.” Stop me if you’ve heard this one before—a well-known American novelist sits down for an interview, and he says, “I don’t have very many black friends. I have never been in love with a black woman. I feel like if I had, I might dare [to write about race] … I feel it’s really dangerous, if you are a liberal white American, to presume that your good intentions are enough to embark on a work of imagination about black America. I am particularly vigilant there. I have thought about it—you know, race is big in America.” When Lucia Berlin died in 2004, she left behind the makings of a memoir, including a long story about traveling through Mexico with Buddy Berlin, a saxophonist with a heroin problem: “First, Peggy sent a little box with a dozen vials of pure morphine. ‘A little something for Bud.’ Peggy lived alone in a fabulous house on top of the hill. She spent much of her day looking through a powerful telescope, checking the beach for arrivals of famous people to invite up to her house, checking out everything else going on. She must have seen the boys playing soccer with village boys, riding horseback on the beach, going upriver with Juanito to help his father pick coffee. She must have seen them racing canoes, heard their laughter echoing above the water. She must have seen us talking with friends in our beautiful garden, lying on the beach. She must have seen Buddy and me kiss, must have seen us happy. How could she send that box?” Our puzzle correspondent, Dylan Hicks, has vouched early and often for the joys of hink pink, “a word game in which synonyms, circumlocution, and micronarratives provide clues for rhyming phrases.” His advocacy has led to a paradigm shift among puzzle enthusiasts who also read literary magazines: at The Cincinnati Review, Michael Griffith has written some hink pinks of his own. (Personal favorite: “Internet discussion board for boosters of an ex-Pennsylvania senator and presidential candidate,” which can only be “Santorum forum.”) In what many “content providers” probably regard as “the good old days,” fans were more or less powerless—if they didn’t like whatever schlock the major entertainment conglomerates were churning out, their only recourse was a letter-writing campaign. But things are different now, and this year the fans have demanded to be heard. As Elizabeth Minkel writes, “For the past few months, people have been debating whether fandom is ‘broken’ … Fans have always talked back, but prior to social media they weren’t even a fraction as visible as they are today. We’re witnessing the destruction of the fannish fourth wall in real-time: fans and creators are now seeing each other clearly on a massive scale, and creators are unsure how to—or if they even should—listen to fans.”
July 29, 2016 Correspondence Saving Chester Himes’s Cat By Dan Piepenbring Chester Himes with his cat, Griot. Chester Himes and John Alfred Williams met in 1961 and soon began a long and occasionally tempestuous correspondence about their personal lives and the difficulty of finding a fair reception as African American writers in the publishing world. By the late sixties, Himes had moved to Spain, where he wrote Williams frequently about the privations of life abroad. In the letters below, they discuss Himes’s beloved cat, Griot. These excerpts come from Dear Chester, Dear John, a 2008 collection of the pair’s correspondence. Himes died in 1984; Williams passed away last summer, at eighty-nine. Read More
July 29, 2016 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Road-tripping, Heart-eating, Earth-fucking By The Paris Review Danny DeVito in a still from Wiener-Dog. I could tell you the ending of every story in Scott McClanahan’s collection Hill William, and it wouldn’t spoil a thing. His stories are all about the telling, like oral tradition captured on the page. To be honest, I don’t know the extent to which this is a book of fiction—it’s based on McClanahan’s childhood in Appalachian West Virginia, in the town of Rainelle, where he grew up, and the narrator is named Scott—but it doesn’t matter; a story is a story, whether true or invented whole cloth. McClanahan’s youthful tales swing between an outlandish realism (a guy named Bobbie B. describes how his cousin was once so lonely “he went out and fucked the earth”) and a vague religious fervor that makes sense coming from a kid who’s trying to figure out the world. In the same way, amid the characters’ grotesque behavior are transcendent moments—not least Scott’s mother, who appears indistinctly in the book, as though always off-screen, but who is a wondrous light in his life; he also finds unlikely reprieve in a church chorus: “And there was something about those voices, so ugly by themselves, but beautiful together, that seemed like the meaning of the world to me.” —Nicole Rudick At least it’s been a good summer for road movies. First there was the dachshund picaresque Wiener-Dog, which has everything I could want from a Todd Solondz film—including a deep, dark performance from Danny DeVito as an adjunct professor at the end of his rope. Then there was the continuous, two-hour surprise of Captain Fantastic, directed by Matt Ross, with Viggo Mortensen as a Washington State survivalist who takes his kids on a bus trip to suburban Santa Fe. Don’t let the premise fool you: with each turn of the plot, this amiable family drama gains in complexity, ambiguity, and pathos. It’s hard to imagine two big indie releases that have less in common, but I loved them both. —Lorin Stein Read More
July 29, 2016 On the Shelf The Backside of the Painting, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Vik Muniz, Verso (Illha de Itamaraca), 2016. The hatchet job isn’t what it used to be. To read Tobias Smollett’s book reviews from the eighteenth century is to discover, as J. H. Pearl writes, ever-higher concentrations of venom: “Smollett, who helmed The Critical Review from 1756 to 1763, never minced words in his judgment of whether a particular text was worth the paper it was printed on … All Smollett needed, it seems, was a target for his wrath. And as the pages of the Review attest, targets abounded … Specific reviewers remained anonymous, the better to create the impression of a unified voice, but writers of badly reviewed books tended to blame Smollett, returning their fire on him. It’s easy to understand that anger. Would you want your book called ‘a very trivial, insipid, injudicious and defective performance, without plan, method, learning, accuracy, or elegance; an unmeaning composition of shreds, rags, and remnants … a patched, a pie-bald, linsey-woolsey nothing’? (That was the assessment of a book called A New and Accurate History of South-America.)” Because people excel at finding new ways to waste other people’s time, a small but vocal faction of conservative educators and politicians have called on our schools to start teaching cursive again. Tamara Thornton, the author of the 1996 book Handwriting in America, sees the reactionary anxiety at the center of their argument: “Learning cursive has never been just about learning how to express yourself in writing … In the early twentieth century, it’s about following models and suppressing your individuality … We get very interested in cursive when we feel that our morals are in a state of decline, all hell is breaking loose, people are doing whatever they want … And I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch that the sort of people who believe in the standard model of the family get very nervous when we depart from the standard models of the cursive script. So there have been periodic bouts of hysteria about the decline of cursive. And it’s always when we feel that as a society, we’re going down the tubes.” The artist Vik Muniz—clearly a very patient and detail-oriented man—has created a series of painstakingly accurate emulations of the backsides of famous paintings. Claire Voon writes, “With all their hardware—the wooden beams, wires, nails, and other knickknacks—the fading stickers, and the inked scribbles from the hands of conservators or handlers, the frames often reveal additional stories to the much-discussed paintings they cradle. You have to wonder if there’s a reason why someone, for instance, scrawled a north-facing arrow and the French word Haut on the Mona Lisa—essentially, shorthand for ‘This side up’ … The Mona Lisa was one of the largest challenges: Muniz had to buy a tree in Tennessee to re-create its frame, making sure to also precisely reconstruct the museum’s own contemporary update: an electronic device that monitors a gap nineteenth-century conservators had closed with a butterfly joint. If that gap widens a single micron, someone will receive a text notification.” Given the unhinged chaos that characterizes politics at the moment, why aren’t there more political novels? “My sense is that quite a few writers—and also their readers—feel somehow duty-bound to be in opposition; and what results is a certain lacuna in our collective imagination. Hanif Kureishi has lamented that, unlike in Dickens’s time, there is not one contemporary writer with ‘a sense of the whole society, from prisoner to home secretary.’ But there is often a difficulty for writers who adopt an overtly political stance. A novelist may set out purposefully to make a book that furthers a cause, but it is not likely to be any good, since good books don’t carry messages like sacks carry coal.” At the White Plains Annual Reptile Expo, Madeline Cash dissects the strange bond between lizard and lizard keeper: “That unspoken connection no one else could understand, which maybe didn’t even exist, echoed all over the Convention Center. A lizard’s inhuman qualities are its appeal. They are whatever you need them to be—loving, smiling, a good listener — because the relationship is all a projection … When I saw the bearded dragons, my heart swelled. The gold-breasted beasts had the same long mouths carved across their faces that, as a child, I’d understood to be a smile. The vendor handed one over in an attempt to make a sale off my nostalgia. It cocked its head up at me with that permanent grin and it all flooded back.”